The funny thing about holidays is that by the time they’re over, you’re nearly glad to get home. As daily readers will know, I spent the last two weeks in Madeira, and then Poland, and then Ukraine, with a day or two at home in between. For the first of those weeks, I simply turned off the phone and ignored work entirely, which is something I highly recommend that everyone does at least once a year. There’s a tendency – and I see this in some readers and emailers – to get dangerously addicted to the news, and the twists and turns of what are ultimately minor stories on a daily basis, sometimes at the expense of the big picture. If you’re somebody who reads my writing three or four times a week, then the good news is that I’m very grateful to you, but the bad news is that it objectively makes you a weirdo compared to the rest of the population, who just don’t think about the things we discuss here in anything like the amount of detail that people like us do. That’s why it’s useful to just sometimes forget about it and switch off.
That said, I’m still an addict. So, it’s good to be back.
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